LiveChathttp://www.livechatinc.com
Live Chat Software and Help Desk SoftwareSat, 01 Aug 2015 16:03:03 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2Improve communication skills: speedy and efficient customer servicehttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/improve-communication-skills/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/improve-communication-skills/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 13:38:40 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=78480
You can take your customer service from good to great by learning how to improve your communication skills and speed up your support.

See what 10 methods we use to make our communication more efficient and to help several customers at a time.

With a bit of passion and a good deal of practice, you too can improve your communication skills and get your 2 hours worth of chats in 1 hour of work.

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You can take your customer service from good to great speeding up your support.

It’s all about scale. Once you get everything right when talking to one customer, it’s time to do it with six other customers, at the same time.

To handle that kind of workload, you need efficiency that comes with certain communication skills. Things like mental and technical shortcuts, better understanding of what customers need and changing the way you form your replies will allow you to save time and better help your customers.

And when you have more time, you can use it to help a greater number of customers. By shaving a couple minutes here and there, you will be able to take on more and more cases.

Get 140 days of chats in 30 days of work

One of the best things about online customer service tools like live chat or help desk is their ability to scale.

When compared to a more traditional means of helping your customers, for example a call center, it really shows how small improvements can make a big difference for the speed of your support.

To show you how much you can get from using live chat efficiently, we did a bit of testing in our customer service department and compared one week’s worth of work, which is around 400 hours, with a call center.

Call center agents are able to get around 33 to 40 minutes of talking in one hour of work. This is due to the switching, routing, lunch breaks and other interruptions. It translates to around 220 to 267 hours of actual conversations with customers over 400 hours of work time.

These brackets seem to check out when compared with one of our partner call centers, which gets around 237 hours worth of calls in 400 hours of work.

During the same 400 hours, our agents managed to have over 860 hours of chats. This amounts to getting 140 days of chatting in a normal, 30-day month! Bare in mind, that our agents also have lunch breaks and experience other interruptions so it’s not like they are constantly chatting.

What’s the catch? There is none. This kind of efficiency can be reached without any loss in quality.

The biggest detriment to the efficiency of a call center is simply using the phone to communicate with customers. Even if they managed to get rid of the downtime, they would only be able to get 400 hours of calling in their 400 hours of work.

When using something like live chat to get in touch with customers, there are no such barriers. Thanks to the fact that you can chat with multiple customers at the same time, you can turn one hour of work into two and more hours of chatting.

10 ways to improve communication skills

Using tools like live chat or email will immediately put you ahead of the more traditional forms of contact. To get even more out of your customer service, you need to get more efficient.

We use these 10 methods to improve our communication with customers. With a bit of passion and a good deal of practice, you also can improve communication skills of your agents and start bending time to get your 2 hours worth of chats in 1 hour of work.

Here’s what you need to do to speed things up.

1. Use short, simple sentences.

Don’t complicate your replies. Preparing long replies will not only take a long time to type in for the agent but also to read for the customer. Make your job and your customers’ lives easier by offering shorter answers.

If you need to explain how to do something, try to split your reply a bit – one sentence for one step. This makes your replies easier to follow as the customer can simply look to the next step on the list instead of having to scan a block of text for a solution.

Don’t go into too much detail. If a customer needs a quick fix to make your payment form cooperate, don’t bore them with explanations on how everything is set up.

Try to gauge what customers need to know. If a piece of information can help a customer solve a problem, don’t hesitate to include it. However, if it’s optional, it might be a good idea to skip it to make your reply shorter.

2. Use canned responses

If you often need to write the same reply over and over, try creating a canned response for that reply. Canned responses are pre-made replies that can be quickly recalled during a chat or when replying to an email or a ticket.

They are a bit like cheat sheets. However, in this case, you won’t get busted by your teacher when using them!

Canned responses will allow you to significantly cut down on your reply time. Instead of having to write the same 100-character-long reply to a particular question, you can simply enter a canned response with just a few characters or a couple of clicks.

Over time, you can develop a list of answers for the most common questions you get. When you notice that a particular question is asked often (questions about payments, shipping, sizing, promotions etc.), add it as a canned response.

You can also use them to shorten generic phrases too. Instead of writing Thanks for getting in touch with us and have a great day, you could simply write #thanks and get the same message.

Canned responses can make each contact with a customer much faster. Just don’t go overboard with them and don’t turn into a robot that uses only pre-made answers, especially if they are on the longer side.

3. Order your cases by priority

You should keep a certain order to the support cases you handle for customers. As a rule of thumb, the customers that wait the longest should be your top priority as the risk of bad experience is the biggest for them.

To avoid making people wait forever for an answer, make sure to always handle older cases first (if a solution is possible) and then work your way down to newer requests.

In the long run, this will save you time because you won’t have to explain why you didn’t reply faster. Dealing with emails and tickets that are fresh takes less time as you won’t have to dig as deep to solve them.

This logic is especially useful for dealing with email or ticket responses. Some messages can get buried if you receive tons of emails/tickets. It’s important to remember about those messages and deal with them ASAP.

In LiveChat, the chats are colored to help you decide on priority.

Green circles represent visitors who have received an answer or just asked their question. Chats with those visitors don’t require immediate attention.

Red circles represent customers who asked a question and have been waiting for an answer for some time. Agents should respond to these conversations first.

Finally, there are the Gray circles that represent visitors who either went AFK or left your chat.

4. Use application shortcuts

When handling support cases, you need to perform certain actions tens or even hundreds of times each day. Just imagine how much time you could save if you could make those actions a bit faster with keyboard shortcuts.

For example, instead of clicking on a visitor portrait to bring up a different chat you could simply use a shortcut that would switch you to the next chat.

Any action that requires clicking could be potentially sped up by using a shortcut. This can be anything from opening a new browser tab to finding a particular file. You will be able to support customers faster if you know your way around your applications and their shortcuts.

Give it a go and try using shortcuts for actions you use often. You can make a list of shortcuts and pin it by your screen to learn them faster. Once you get the hang of if, you won’t even want to touch your mouse because it will seem so slow.

5. Copy and paste parts of customers’ messages

When it comes to shortcuts, the two most popular and useful are Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V – the good old copy/paste combo. You probably already use them to make your life easier: when you want to look something from an article up without having to type it in in Google.

In the same way, you can use copy and paste to speed up chats with your customers. For example, when a customer asks for a particular product, you don’t have to write the name of the product by hand if you want to include it in your reply. Simply copy and paste it and add the missing information, e.g. price of the product.

Be on the lookout for phrases that you can use in a reply to make chatting or responding to an email or ticket a bit faster.

6. Using customers’ words

Another thing you should be on the lookout for are keywords and names customers use in relation to your business. This can be a name the customer has for a particular product, or something else they mixed up a bit. For example, instead of saying summer sale they could be calling it a summer discount.

To make your message more clear, you don’t necessarily have to correct the customer. If you are sure what the customer means, adapt and go with the conversation. If they want to call your promo codes discount thingamajig, go with it and tell them where they should enter their thingamajig to get that 10 percent off their purchase.

In situations where you are not sure what they mean, ask them to confirm. Or even better, try to lead the customer and ask if they mean a particular thing. Once you get a confirmation, you can continue to talk about a problem in the customer’s words to make your reply easy to understand.

7. Learn how to type faster

If there is one communication skill that will always save you time when chatting, writing emails or responding to tickets, it would be faster typing. Customer service agents spend a whole lot of their time typing. In fact, most of their day will comprise of typing in chat, email and ticket replies.

To improve your typing speed, you should start with the basics like proper hand placement. Covering the A, S, D and F keys with one hand and the J, K, L and ; keys with the other hand will allow quick access to the whole keyboard.

When typing, avoid looking at the keyboard. After a while, your muscle memory will kick in and you will simply know which finger you need to move to reach a particular key.

Start slow and check for mistakes. You want to reinforce proper typing habits and get rid of the negative ones. You can do that only if you pay close attention to what you type. You can use websites like 10fastfingers.com to check on your progress.

8. Gather and use customer data

You can skip large parts of a conversation just by having access to additional customer information. For example, instead of asking for customers’ order IDs, you could pull them from a CRM or your database.

It’s like calling a stranger vs. calling and old friend. When you call someone for the first time, there are the greetings, the introductions and honorifics before you can say what you really want. On the other hand, when you call an old friend, you can simply say sup and move to your point.

Knowing how to use customer information is an important skills that can give your agents a huge head start as they don’t have to begin their conversations with the same questions.

There are a couple ways you can collect and then use this kind of data.

You can gather it during pre-chat surveys that are filled with fields like name
, email or order ID. Depending on what your agents need to solve support cases, you can ask for different information. For example, if your customer’s email is essential to solving a problem, you should ask for it straight away.

You can also use a CRM service to manage your contacts. They will allow you to create profiles for customers that can be then filled with useful data. You can also integrate your chat with your CRM to get the best results: the emails customers use to sign in to your chat can be used to automatically pull all related data and display it in live chat.

9. Get a second monitor

If you are looking into additional data to speed up conversations with customers, think about displaying it on another screen.

You can switch pretty quickly between your main customer service tool like chat and your CRM using the Alt + Tab shortcut, but it’s still slower than simply looking to another screen.

You can have your chat, email or help desk on one screen at all times to quickly react to new enquiries and use the other monitor to look up data on customers, check your website and all other things you need to do.

It’s a simple fix that will save you the need to use Alt + Tab a couple of hundred times each day.

10. Know your limits

If you get too many cases at one time, you will start rushing. When that happens, it’s easy to make mistakes. And you can be sure that your customers will notice the drop in quality!

Don’t go overboard with your efforts to make things more effective. Start small and pick up more cases only when you feel confident with your current workload.

It’s good to have a backup plan in case you take on too much. For example, you could have a colleague on standby to help you when things go out of hand.

In LiveChat, you can set up a fallback plan that will automatically transfer any chat if the visitor didn’t receive an answer for a set amount of time.

This helps in situations where you already have several chats that require 100 percent of your attention. The chat is simply moved to the next free agent.

When it comes to tickets and emails, you should always know if you don’t have the time or resources to solve your cases. If you happen to get emails or tickets you know you won’t be able to respond to, make sure another agent picks them up.

Try to beat our time

Once you start to improve communication skills and the speed of your support starts picking up, you will find that you have more and more time for either a larger number of support cases or other work-related activities.

I’m no expert, but I’m sure all this time warping and stretching would leave Flash really impressed. Make it your personal challenge to beat our score of 2 hours of chatting to every 1 hour of work. And when you do, make sure to let us know that we’re slacking!

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/improve-communication-skills/feed/0What is CQ and why is it essential for successful customer supporthttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/personal-control/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/personal-control/#commentsWed, 15 Jul 2015 13:11:06 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=78101The ability to stay cool when situation becomes challenging requires a great degree of personal control. But, what’s most important in today’s customer service environment is not just how well a frontline rep can handle one particular challenging interaction, but how well he can handle the next one. And the one after that. And don't forget to smile while doing it.

It’s called control quotient, or CQ. In short, it’s the ability to take control over interactions with customers. People with high CQ are naturally better at personal control. In sport, this psychological quality is called a short memory.

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The ability to stay cool when situation becomes challenging requires a great degree of personal control. But, what’s most important in today’s customer service environment is not just how well a frontline rep can handle one particular challenging interaction, but how well he can handle the next one. And the one after that. And don’t forget to smile while doing it.

It’s called control quotient, or CQ. In short, it’s the ability to take control over interactions with customers. People with high CQ are naturally better at personal control.

In sport, this psychological quality is called a short memory. Having a short memory might be one of the most valuable assets a player can have. A tennis champion who was two points away from winning the Wimbledon, comes back the next year without dragging that negative experience in a way that impacts his future performance. He moves on.

Clearing the mind of the latest mistake and moving on is often what makes a difference between pro and champion. When a champion loses a gem – he moves on. When he makes double fault – he moves on.
A tennis player serves anywhere from 150 to 200 serves in a match and he will return a similar amount. There’s no point dwelling over previous shots.

„It helps to have a short memory. You have to be able to brush off a bad loss to compete next week”, said Andy Roddick, former professional tennis player and World No.1.

You shake off the negatives and get back into a positive mindset. You’re already engaged in the next ball, match or next tournament. As if the bad thing never happened.

CQ in customer service

According to the authors of the book “The Effortless Experience”, CQ has the biggest impact on increasing the rep’s performance in today’s service environment. The other ones are: basic skills and behaviours, advanced problem solving (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ).

Reps with high CQ are resilient, take ownership over customer issues and respond well to a criticism. They also have the ability to bounce back from a negative or emotionally challenging experience with one customer and then, no matter the outcome of this interaction, bad or good, they are able to start fresh just seconds later with the next customer.

CQ isn’t learned, it’s enabled

In the analysis of 1,320 reps, it turned out that only about 6 percent of reps have little to no CQ. 30 percent already had high CQ. But, fully 94 percent of all reps – average employees – have at least moderate CQ, which can blossom under right conditions. We can observe it along companies. While CQ doesn’t vary all that much by individual, it varies a lot from one company to the next. That’s why we can definitely extract high–CQ and low–CQ companies. And the key that unlocks CQ potential is not the training or people – it’s the environment.

It’s the work environment those people are subjected to on a daily basis that enables higher rep performance. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that if you were to transplant the entire frontline workforce of a low–CQ company into the environment of a high–CQ, their performance would immediately increase.

And the other way around. So, what differentiates these two environments?

In high–CQ companies, reps feel that they are free to do whatever they think is right to serve the customer. But it’s not about permitting total anarchy at work. There’s a middle ground between that total freedom and tightly restricting every rep’s action.

In low–CQ companies, reps’ job is to stick to the game plan that’s already been scripted. They stiffly go through every point on the list, with no variation from one customer to the next. This approach would work, if all customers were exact the same. Well, they’re not. They’re unique, with different personalities, needs and expectations. It is graded as a „good job” because rep does everything he or she is hired for – follow the rules. Meantime, for a customer, that’s the opposite of a good service.

So, how companies can create high–CQ environment and enable CQ potential in their employees?

Creating high–CQ environment

The Effortless Experience authors brought up three factors, which transform average company into high-CQ company. These factors can be enabled by customer service managers.

1. Trust in rep judgment

In high–CQ companies, reps feel that they can do whatever is right to serve a customer. They feel trusted. One way to achieve that is to eliminate the checklist mentality and remove pressure of time from a contact center.

Eliminate the checklist mentality

By eliminating standard checklist mentality, companies allow reps to be more flexible in their interactions with customers.

Example:

This approach was originally developed by a UK–based bank. Their reps are assessed based on their competencies tied to specific outcomes. Each competency also has five different „mastery levels”, with clear definitions for it. During coaching sessions with each rep, supervisors listen to previously recorded calls and agree on which level the rep is achieving with that customer. An agent in their collection department is evaluated on six competencies:

– Interaction with customer
– Identification of opportunities to create a mutual solution
– Call control
– Negotiation skills
– Urgency to resolve the issue as soon as possible
– The communication of consequences if the issue is not resolved

There are specific criteria to define the mastery levels for each competency. For example, the competency „interaction with customer” has five levels of the mastery: novice, emerging, effective, advanced and expert.

Mastery level

Description of Competency

Novice

We are distracted, interrupt or ask the customer to repeat information provided earlier.

We fail to probe warning signs that we may be on the wrong path, strategy or education

Effective

We use a collaborative and assertive tone during negotiation.

We ask questions to clarify.

Advanced

We use empathy to gain trust and motivate a payment or desired outcome from the customer

Expert

We make a real connection through developing exceptional rapport.

We show real insight into customers and their individual priorities.

As you see, instead of the typical checklist, they have common sense guidance. The results?

Within just a year, the company’s collections team saw an 8 percent increase in customers paying their overdue balances on the spot. They also reported a 50 percent increase in customers who were willing to commit to a specific payment plan.

Remove pressure of time

In low–CQ companies, sometimes reps are doing a good job at customer service, but it takes them longer than the average rep to do so. It’s not considered as a “good job”, because of AHT – average handle time. In that kind of environment, when the rep had a long interaction with one customer because of a more complex issue, then the next interaction, no matter how complex the issue will be, is going to be really short. It’s because reps don’t want to ruin their personal AHT.

High–CQ companies abandoned the measurement of AHT. After all, how good can you do your job with a clock ticking above your head?

Since customers’ expectations for personalized service has begun to rise, it’s time to change the mindset and realize that the quality of the interaction is much more important than handling a conversation as quick as possible.

Example:

A pharmaceutical company took drastic steps to improve the quality of its service by enabling reps to simply do whatever they have to do to take care of the one customer they’re talking to right now. If a customer has a complex issue that needs more time to resolve, reps can give it to them. And they can give exactly the same time to next customer as well. Instead of reporting AHT, the company implemented a new dashboard metric called Available Talk Percentage:

Idle time is when a rep is ready to take a call but there isn’t one in the queue. ATP tells managers how efficient a rep is with all the other work besides talking to customers, like after–call work and other administrative duties. The point is that employees should do their non–customer work as efficiently as possible so they can have more time to talk to customers who need their help.

The results of the AHT–to–ATP conversion have greatly exceeded the expectations of the customer service management team. In a period of just one year, overall customer satisfaction went up 15 percentage points.

2. Rep understanding and alignment with company goals

For the average employee, the typical corporate vision seems far away and just too corporate. It’s important to clarify to reps the direct connection between what they do and what the company is trying to achieve.

Employees who are engaged are more likely to try harder to perform at a higher level. It’s because they understand and appreciate the connection between their everyday work and the overall big picture of the organization. This sense of connection to the bigger mission is critical to maximize their CQ.

Example:

One of the Canadian financial services created a process by which each individual rep is able to adopt the company’s service mission in their own unique way. It helps to define what contribution customer service has in achieving company’s goals.

The process begins with forming a Rep Committee. The committee members study a company’s values and its mission and then break those down into component parts to find out what it means to reps in their daily work. Next, they figure out what reps could do to impact on achieving a single corporate goal.
They create a list of specific actions and present it to the reps. During typical one–on–one sessions with a supervisor, reps chose to which action he or she wants to commit. This helps them see a direct connection between what they do and the company’s goal.

“We have witnessed tremendous results. Engagement has increased, absenteeism has decreased, and client compliments have increased more than 20 percent,” said the Director of customer service operations.

3. Strong rep peer support network

Having a strong rep peer support network has more impact on CQ than the other two drivers – trust and alignment (it’s 17 percent). It’s also the hardest one to get right. The authors of the book believe that there are three conditions that must be met for the maximum benefits of peer support:

– Adequate time – companies should enable reps to participate in supporting one another. This support should be part of the job, not something a rep does in its spare time.

– True best–practice sharing – reps should share their ideas and thoughts on how to best serve a customer. Especially when it comes to complex issues that don’t have only one right solution or an issue that has never been addressed before.

– Receptive reps – reps should be able to help each other, for example, in forums that are not controlled by management.

Example:

To meet all of the three above conditions, it’s recommended to implement the mix of two ideas: peer coaching and team discussion forum.

Fidelity Investments has created a fully rep–owned forum called „Spaces”. The forum is operated exclusively by reps and it helps them in free exchange of ideas. It is moderated only by one rep. This person is responsible for creating discussion topics and generating reports about key rep issues and suggestions that are later presented to management. They also report back about implements and decisions made by management. Each shift has its own „team champion” who maintains the buzz and encourages coworkers to participate more actively in discussions.

The suggestions covered a wide variety of issues, including suggestions for how to reduce unnecessary customer call volume, and how to increase operational efficiency. The total savings realized as a result of these successful implementations represented a significant cost reduction for the company, while increasing the degree of peer support and CQ for its frontline staff.

Deliver the desired service

Environment influences people’s behavior, their mood and motivation to act. It also facilitates or discourages interactions among people. That’s why it’s essential to have a supportive and positive environment at the workplace.

A company with high–CQ can activate a rep’s CQ potential. And, in today’s complex customer service, it’s one of the most important competency for reps to possess. CQ gives them control over interactions with customers and ability to bounce back after bad or emotionally charged experience.

In high–CQ company, reps are engaged, happy, and they feel support for their health and well–being. They are also empowered to exercise their own judgment and they feel trusted. In result, they deliver desired service experience for each and every customer. And they never forget to smile.

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/personal-control/feed/0Customer loyalty: how to seduce customershttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/customer-loyalty/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/customer-loyalty/#commentsFri, 10 Jul 2015 15:40:04 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=78136
Some people think that customer loyalty is a relic of the past. Too many companies offer way too many products to stay loyal to one brand! Only few will choose Toyota because their father used to drive Toyota Pickup in the 80’s. You won’t find a housewife buying the same baking powder because her mother and grandmother used it.

Times have changed.

But does it mean that loyalty sank into the oblivion? Not at all. There is only one thing that has changed: the way customer loyalty can be gained. Because now, besides giving the best possible service and product, you need to give people more reasons to buy from you.

There are two recipes for success. You can either appeal to your customers' reason and offer benefits they won’t resist, or you can speak to their hearts and show the, that you share the same principles. But before you get to that, you need to make sure that your company provides great service.

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Some people think that customer loyalty is a relic of the past. Too many companies offer way too many products to stay loyal to one brand. Only few will choose Toyota because their father used to drive Toyota Pickup in the 80’s. You won’t find a housewife buying the same baking powder because her mother and grandmother used it.

Times have changed.

But does it mean that loyalty sank into the oblivion? Not at all. There is only one thing that has changed: the way customer loyalty can be gained. Now, besides giving the best possible service and product, you need to give people more reasons to buy from you.

There are two recipes for success. You can either appeal to your customers’ reason and offer benefits they won’t resist, or you can speak to their hearts and show that you share the same principles. But before you get to that, you need to make sure that your company provides great service.

Start from the basics

You can come out with the most brilliant idea of bonding customers to your brand, but if you forget about basics, it’s not going to work out.

Great quality of your products and services is something you definitely need to start with. If your product is lacking quality, even the best marketing team in the world won’t help you to keep your customers. If you want to keep them, you need to give them good product. Dot!

Another important thing: great customer service. Entrepreneurs tend to forget that customer service is a face of the business. Make sure that it’s welcoming and helpful!

When you’re sure that your company offers the best products and services it can offer, it’s time for finding your own path to winning customers’ attention. Copying someone’s successful idea may bring you some results, but in most cases a solution that works for somebody else but may not necessarily work for you as well.

You should come up with something unique, something that will reflect your company’s customer care or its personality. Seduce your customers with an awesome loyalty program or by representing the same values that your audience believe in.

Customer loyalty hack #1: reward your customers

There is no better way of showing that you care about your customers than by introducing a great loyalty program. It shows appreciation for customers you already have and encourages new ones to try your services. People may not like your fanpage and may not know what is your brand’s motto, but if you give them a great loyalty program, they’ll love you!

Let’s see an example: AAdvantage from American Airlines, one of the most successful (and revolutionary!) loyalty programs of all times.

The program’s idea is simple: by flying with American Airlines or one of their partners, you earn “miles” which can be exchanged for flights, vacations, car rentals, ticket upgrades, airport privileges and many others. The more loyal you are, the more benefits you earn. It’s easy and very useful for customers. Let’s say this straight: they love it!

But back then in 1981 the company had to face rapid appearance of competition which, one by one, started to imitate AAdvantage. To remain matchless, American Airlines had to make their program even more beneficial for their customers: established partnerships with hotels and rental car companies, offered promotions and discounts.

For many marketers AAdvantage seems to be too perfect to be working. It is even said to be “too rich for the benefits drawn by the companies offering them”. But the company doesn’t seem to go bankrupt. After all, with over 67 million users, one out of every 100 people in the world is an AAdvantage member. Impressive!

Customer loyalty hack #2: share your values

There is a large group of customers who make purchases in a different way than most shoppers. They are more conscious about the products they choose and the companies they buy from. They can’t be seduced with catchy slogans, creative campaigns and benefits. They are loyal to brands they share their values with.

By spreading awareness about your brand’s values, actions and beliefs, you can let these people to identify with it and be loyal to it.

A great example of a brand that benefited from sharing its values is Dove. In 2004 it started the “Real Beauty” campaign. The idea came from the company’s study which revealed that only 2% of women would describe themselves as beautiful. Dove became an ambassador of natural beauty, started to challenge beauty stereotypes and provoked social debate.

At Dove, our vision is of a world where beauty is a source of confidence, and not anxiety. So, we are on a mission to help the next generation of women develop a positive relationship with the way they look – helping them raise their self-esteem and realize their full potential.

Dove’s campaign is a very interesting example for one reason: it was well received, but it became controversial at the same time. Many people criticized the whole idea, pointing out that Dove’s models were photoshopped. Others did not like the fact that Dove was always choosing very specific models: with no scars, with flawless skin, beautiful hair and “not too curvy” bodies.

Despite of the criticism, the “Real Beauty” campaign was a win for the company. By 2004 Dove was just one of many skin care product companies. Now, 11 years later, it’s one of the most recognizable companies in its industry and customers identify Dove as a brand promoting a positive body image.

Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” video has gathered more than 114 million total views in the first month, making it the most viral advertisement of all time! This also resulted in sale increase: from $2.5 billion in its inaugural year to $4 billion.

The importance of customer loyalty

Why is customer loyalty important? For a couple of reasons.

It is seven times more expensive to gain a new customer than keeping an existing one. It is also much easier to sell your products to existing customers! Probability of selling something to new customers is about 5-20% compared to an existing customers: 60-70%.

Finally, the most loyal customers become your advocates, helping to build your brand and community around it. Such customers are priceless!

Unfortunately it’s not easy to keep customer loyalty. Many business owners have no idea how to keep their customers and from the other hand, customers very often make decisions about switching to another company.

This is how Emily Collins, analyst at Forrester Research, explains it:

Your customers have fewer reasons to be loyal than ever before and are really less loyal than they’ve ever been before. This is because empowered customers are now in control. They want control over the interactions they have with brands.

It means that if you want to keep your customers, you have to stand out from the crowd and give them a reason to stay with you. You need to seduce them with outstanding products, attract them with extraordinary customer service and a reasonable price.

Then you can choose whether you like to speak to those customers who look for benefits in their relations with brands, or those who would like to support your values. You can give them a loyalty program they deserve or you can let your personality shine. It is up to you.

Each of these methods is equally good, but if you combine both of them, you can break the bank.

Cover photo courtesy of Hernán Piñera via Creative Commons.]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/07/customer-loyalty/feed/0How to write a knowledge base articlehttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/knowledge-base-article/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/knowledge-base-article/#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 18:14:13 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=77951
The main aim of a knowledge base article is to show your customer how something can be done, either on your website or with your product.

Every such article starts with a question. You want to give your customers the means to handle a problem on their own through self-service. Over the course of an article, customers learn how to deal with a problem. If they have any follow-up questions, you should have articles ready for them too.

If you want to create a knowledge base, you need to fill it with articles. Read on to learn how to do that.

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The main aim of a knowledge base article is to show your customer how something can be done, either on your website or with your product.

Every such article starts with a question. You want to give your customers the means to handle a problem on their own through self-service. Over the course of an article, customers learn how to deal with a problem. If they have any follow-up questions, you should have articles ready for them too.

Picking a topic

To start off, you need to choose a topic you want to address. There are a couple of ways of identifying potential problems your customers might have.

Firstly, your customers will be the biggest source of topic ideas for your knowledge base. When you notice that you get a lot of enquiries about a particular topic, you should consider writing about it in an article. For example, if a lot of your customers have a problem with making a return, describe the whole process in an article. This should help you deal with the enquiries you get without having to explain the same topic time and time again.

If you have any way of marking similar cases, e.g. tagging chats or tickets or labeling emails, you should start doing it right away. It will show you the big picture – the most common problems your customers encounter. The sooner you start, the faster you will be able to use it for topic ideas.

Secondly, you can check what kind of keywords your customers are entering on your website. If you have a ‘search’ option on your website, you can check what customers are looking for. If you already have a knowledge base set up, the search option can not only allow your customers to find the desired article faster but also show you what kind of questions they have.

Alternatively, you can check in your Google Analytics for keyword ideas. To do that, you need to fire up your Analytics, go to Acquisition, select the Search Engine Optimization option and pick Queries. This is the list of all the queries made by customers who came to your site via Google.

They can give you an idea what kind of problems they were trying to resolve. For example, “sizing chart” can indicate that someone was looking for sizing explanations on your website.

Finally, you should also use your own intuition for article ideas. When making some kind of change in your product or offering, you should anticipate questions about it. No matter if you release a new product or you introduce a new feature in your online store, you should have an article ready that covers the change.

Organizing the article

After choosing a topic, you need to think about the way you want to present it. Since you want to make it as easy as possible, start with the basics and work your way up to the more advanced instructions.

Start off by identifying the most simple path to resolving a problem. Focus on getting the customer from point A to point B without any distractions. Only when you have the basics explained, you can move to more advanced or optional stuff.

Organizing the information like this will give a solution to everyone and leave a door open for customers who want to use a more advanced approach.

We tend to start with a short introduction that summarizes what the article covers and a screenshot that shows the end result. Showing the end result is especially important as this will allow your customers to quickly notice that they are reading the right article as well as motivate them to follow the instructions. For example, if you are describing how to complete a return form, show the completed form on a screenshot.

Here’s an example from one of our knowledge base articles where we show the end result right after the introduction:

Presenting the instructions

Once you have the introduction covered, you can move to the instructions or, in other words, what needs to be done to make something happen. You should separate them with a heading to make the text easily scannable.

When writing down the instructions, place them within a list. Lists are concise, to-the-point and they are easy to go back to when a customer completes one of the described steps.

Try to limit one step of a process to one point on the list. This way, all the visitor has to remember is the number of the last step they saw. You can have smaller steps like opening a drop-down menu on a website or ticking a box can be grouped together to avoid watering down the instructions. We tend to introduce new steps usually when the customer has to complete a bigger action like saving stored changes or moving to another page.

To make the instructions easier to grasp, you can introduce screenshots to your article. Ideally, you’d want a screenshot for every step of the described process. However, if you already introduced a particular page, you probably don’t have to show it again if nothing significant changes.

To make the screenshots look good, you need three things: a border, the right dimensions and an arrow to point things out. The screenshot should be as wide as the text component in your article. If it’s not necessary, don’t make the screenshot to long as it will stretch your guide.

Adding the border will help you separate the screenshot from the rest of the page. This comes handy when the screenshot could ‘spill’ into the background of your website when they share the same color.

You can add such border by adding a simple CSS parameter to your image files:

style="border:1px solid #ddd"

Add it right after the <img part of graphic file and before the src= part. It will look something like this:

<img style="border:1px solid #ddd” src=“screenshot.jpg”>

The arrow graphic is useful when you need to point to a specific part of a screenshot. You can simply create a single arrow graphic and use it for all of your screenshots.

When pointing to something on the screenshot, make sure to bold it in the text too. For example, when you want to tell the customer to click a particular button, name the button and bold it. Keeping the same phrasing will help too.

The screenshots, arrows and bolding will help you to clearly outline the next step the customer should take. If you make the description too vague, the customer will get lost and won’t be able to finish the tutorial. There’s always some space for giving some exposition and explaining what is happening, but the next step should always be clear.

Expanding on the details

Once you have the bare bones covered, you can move to additional information and more advanced instructions of your knowledge base article. There are two ways of doing that: introducing additional information as side-notes over the course of the guide or separating them from the basic instructions by moving them under another heading.

Side notes are great if you want to cover some optional instructions or additional information that is not crucial to showing how to do something. If you need something explained but you don’t want to make the instructions too difficult, you can use a side note. Just make sure it is clear that the side note is not an integral part of the guide.

For example, you can style it differently:

Pushing the more advanced steps to a separate part of the article allows you to keep the basics simple for everyone and provide more details for those who need it.

When covering advanced options, you can move straight to the point as the basics are already provided. You can also provide a separate link to the advanced portion of the article to offer it to customers who already know the basics. You can do that by adding an ID to the header:

<h2 id=“moving_eyecatcher”>Moving the eye-catcher</h2>

You can link straight to that header by adding a hash sign (#) and the ID at the end of your link. Here’s an example of a link with an ID:

Keeping things simple

No matter if you decide to provide additional information or not, make sure the article is still easily understandable. You should always assume that the article will be your customer’s first contact with your product or service, which means that everything should be explained.

Using simple language will help. Short, to-the-point sentences will do the trick. You want to provide simple instructions, not humor your readers with colorful language.

You should also make the instructions convenient for the reader. For example, instead of telling them to go to your website to click on a link leading to your store, you could link your store right away. It may seem like not much, but it will greatly speed up the solution.

Even though you need to make the instructions understandable for everyone, you can’t be expected to explain certain parts of your product or service in each and every article. You can deal with recurring information by linking to previous articles you wrote. Just make sure you always have at least one place where a process is explained from start to finish. The more articles you have in your knowledge base, the easier it will be to make such connections.

Finding a place for the article

Once your knowledge base article is ready, you need to place it on your website. As your knowledge base grows, you will need to find a way to categorize your articles. Assigning our articles to several categories and offering a FAQ section are some of the knowledge management ways we use to keep things organized.

Naming your articles is always a challenge. The title determines whether a customer will consider reading the article when faced with a particular problem. Once again, you want to keep them as simple as possible. Think of the questions your customers might have and try to address those questions in the titles.

After publishing an article, make sure your team knows about it. You should also add the article to pre-made answers, or email/ticket templates so that your agents can use it in a pinch.

Finally, giving a finished article to someone unfamiliar with the topic is a good way of checking if it is easy enough to follow. What may seem easy to you may not be that clear to someone with less knowledge.

Knowledge base article checklist

With a bit of practice, you will be churning out article after article. Until then, you can refer to the following checklist to tie all loose ends.

You need to remember to:

Provide a short introduction informing the reader about the purpose of the article.

Show the end result on a screenshot to encourage the reader.

Provide the instructions as a list of steps to make them easier to follow.

Start with basic instructions before moving to more advanced uses.

Show key points on screenshots to make identification easier.

Separate additional/optional information from the core of the article.

Add links to explain processes mentioned in the article.

Choose a simple name that readers are likely to look for.

Place the article on your website in the correct category.

Add it to your list of pre-made responses for quick access.

Having these fundamentals covered is not the end. Your articles can always be improved and optimized for easier access. You also need to check periodically if the article is still up to date and doesn’t need any changes.

Keep your articles informative and fresh and your users will be able to take care of their problems on their own.

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/knowledge-base-article/feed/0Let your personality shine through your businesshttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/let-your-personality-shine-through-your-business/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/let-your-personality-shine-through-your-business/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 09:28:37 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=77772
Many businesses hide themselves behind stock photos, soulless copy and scripted conversations. Yawn... they are boring. But, there are other businesses, the brave ones, where people behind the brand show themselves up and tell personal stories. They are engaging, dip into our minds and a magnetic force of their personalities drags us to buy their products and use their services.
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Many businesses hide themselves behind stock photos, soulless copy and scripted conversations. Yawn… they are boring. But, there are other businesses, the brave ones, where people behind the brand show themselves up and tell personal stories. They are engaging, dip into our minds and a magnetic force of their personalities drags us to buy their products and use their services.

Let’s take the Raleigh Denim, a jeans-maker from North Carolina, as an example. When you get on the company’s website you won’t find a buy-me-now copy or generic photos. Instead, you’ll see a personal-sized film telling the owners’ story. The owners are a couple. In the film they express passion to each other and to the jeans they make. After 5 minutes of watching it I catch the true vibe of the company. I get to know real people who run the business, and as a result I get to know the company way better than if I went through a website full of a sale-copy.

What happens when you show yourself

Showing yourself means expressing one’s personality. Among humans, personality is a powerful force which gives us clues about who we like and who we don’t like. We are literally dragged to people with certain personalities and repelled from people with other personalities. Same mechanism works for people when they get in touch with a company. When a company expresses its personality, we unconsciously get attracted to it or deterred from it. The force of attraction caused by a personality is often stronger than a rational decision-making process.

If at this point you get scared that showing yourself will put off some people, don’t be. You will simply scare off customers who don’t get your business. They would be the ones who cause the most problems and constantly insist that you change your product or service into something it isn’t.

Showing yourself triggers emotions

Expressed personality evokes an emotional response from the people who get in touch with your company. When emotions appear they encourage long-term memory. People simply start to remember your company. In contrast, when you hide your personality and use general messages, people get bored and almost nothing sets down in their minds.

Take a look at the Raleigh Denim’s brand statement:

For people who love what they do and get shit done.

Did you just smile? Was it a ‘shit’ word? If you had an emotional reaction to this statement you will likely remember it.

What it takes to show yourself

Your personality is a great asset and you can use it almost everywhere in your business: in design, copy, interactions with customers, and product or service. To bring it to your brand you need to ask yourself who you are and what you value and show it up to the public. Simply said, if you’re more of a polite type create polite messages, if you’re more of a swearer, swear. When you decide to be real in business, there’s no compromise, you just are who you are. You just tell what is important to you. And you just use your own voice.

One of the businesses that comes to my mind now is Steve and Kate’s Camp. It’s a company which communicates in a personal and funny way throughout their website. Being funny is a personal style of the owners, Steve and Kate. When I hang around their website I just feel like meeting them in person.

Interestingly, they also use a lot of pronouns, like: we, you, our, yours in the messages. By using these words the owners say directly what they believe in and why they are doing what they’re doing.

More than one personality

When you are a one-man business or a business run by a couple it’s easy to infuse your personality to your company. But what if you have more people on board? Can they all express themselves? If you hire like-minded people who share similar values, life approaches and sense of humor, then the answer is yes. People who tune into your voice will be a reflection of your personality. It will be more of a collective personality, but still sounding similar to the one you would express all by yourself. The only thing you need to do is let them be authentic and autonomic in their work.

Be real

We are smart beings and sniff out fake messages like sketchy photo or stiff copy. Those don’t move our emotions and we don’t establish a human-to-human connection with brands who are distant and unreal. As a result those brands lack loyal customers who leave for brands with a human face. So if you’ve been hiding behind generic messages, it’s time to come out and show yourself through your work. Be real and see what happens.

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/let-your-personality-shine-through-your-business/feed/0Become a hero your customers deserve: Adam Toporek interviewhttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/become-a-hero-your-customers-deserve-interview-with-adam-toporek/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/become-a-hero-your-customers-deserve-interview-with-adam-toporek/#commentsMon, 15 Jun 2015 15:26:53 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=77503
What makes great customer service? Is it the customer-centric attitude? Is it about changing bad customer experience into a good one? Or maybe it all comes down to motivating and training customer service representatives?

Adam Toporek, customer service expert and the author of “Be Your Customer’s Hero”, shares his thoughts about what great customer service means.

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What makes great customer service? Is it the customer-centric attitude? Is it about changing bad customer experience into a good one? Or maybe it all comes down to motivating and training customer service representatives?

Adam Toporek, customer service expert and the author of Be Your Customer’s Hero, shares his thoughts about what great customer service means.

You are a born entrepreneur. How did you start your career?

I am actually a 3rd generation entrepreneur. My grandfather owned a small, main street shoe store. My father was a retailer, and he opened a wholesale distributorship. And then I have owned numerous companies and small businesses myself.

Like many people, especially when you’re talking about customer service and frontline customer service, I’ve started by having a frontline job. I did telemarketing outside of college, I worked in a bookstore, working the floor, and I worked in a retail music store. I’ve had a variety of retail jobs. As I’ve gotten older and my career developed, I started owning multiple service franchises, so that’s when I became a retail business owner.

I think that background gave me a unique lens, as I now know what it means to make decisions with customer service where every dollar you give away for service recovery comes out of next month’s rent or out of your utility bills. It really gave me a real world focus and real world lens.

And now you are sharing your knowledge?

Oh, absolutely! With CTS Service Solutions and my new book “Be Your Customer’s Hero” I really try to take the experiences I’ve had and the focus I’ve had on customers to help other people with that knowledge. People struggle so much with customer service and customer experience!

Sometimes it can be really difficult but a lot of times it’s really mastering certain basics and knowing when to use the right techniques at the right time.

Where did the idea to write “Be Your Customer’s Hero” came from?

You know, it came from my background. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a small business owner and once I was in one of my retail businesses. I’ve just walked into the business, I opened the door for this customer and I watched her walk in. She was just happy, she was smiling, she was having a great day, and I watched her walking up to the front desk of my business.

I watched my front desk employee sit there. She was slouched down, she was reclining in the chair. Her hair was horribly brushed, her uniform was dirty and wrinkled. She did not even acknowledge the customer! She made a few clicks with her mouth and said: “OK, you’re checked in”. And then without even looking at the customer, she turned back to the employee next to her and continued the conversation she had.

Sounds like a nightmare!

I know! It’s hard to describe emotions I had at this moment. It was a shock, “did that really just happen?” There was anger, “how little can one person care?” How little they can care about their job, about other people? And then, finally, I was embarrassed. I thought: is this really a person that represents me? Is this a face of my business to our customers? And I was so upset on so many levels that it literally made me sick.

I considered it a failure on my part. I was sick because I knew I had failed. I felt that I’d failed to inculcate the right customer-centric values in my team, and I failed to give this person the training and tools they needed to deliver the types of customer experiences I’d always envisioned us providing. And that’s when I realized I needed a tool. Something that I could hand my frontline employees that would teach them what they needed to know about customer service.

So over time I’ve developed trainings, I’ve created new positions, I wrote handbooks and many, many years later I ended up writing a book called “Be Your Customer’s Hero”.

And who did you write it for? Is it only for business owners or is it also for customer service agents?

It’s for both, though it is primarily focused on frontline reps and that means people who interact face to face, phone to phone, chat to chat with customers. But past that, it really is for business owners, supervisors and managers, because so many of the principles are applicable to anybody who works with customers.

The techniques in this book and the guidance on mindset and customer mentality can be invaluable in those moments when you interact with customers. They’re certainly invaluable to managing a team of people who interact with customers all day every day.

The introduction to your book says that it is designed “not just to educate but to motivate.” What kind of motivation do you mean? A motivation to have great customer service?

It is to motivate people to want to give great customer service. I can teach you every technique I know, but if you don’t care about giving a great customer service, if you don’t understand why the customer is important, all the techniques in the world really aren’t going to help you. You’ve got to know that you want to be customer-centric.

For a lot of people, it’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that we’re not wired for customer service. We have pride and there’s a positive pride, like the pride in your team, your store, your brand or yourself, but there’s also the “don’t disrespect me” kind of pride. When somebody gets angry at you or customer raises his voice it causes you to immediately react defensively. That may be a natural reaction, but it’s not a good customer service reaction.

Motivation is really getting people to understand why customers are important and how to get around your mindset to want to interact with customers. One of the chapters is called “Complaints Should Come with Bows on Them” meaning a complaint is like a gift. When somebody gives you a complaint, you can look at it as an attack or an assault on yourself, or you can look at it as “hey, this is feedback, I need to be better”.

What is the reason why so many people do not understand that customer service is so important?

There are people who don’t understand it. There are people who understand it and act on it. And there’s this big chunk in the middle that understand it intellectually – they know that customer service is important, they know that they should treat customers well – but they do not do that.

The thing is that there are a lot of younger people in customer service positions, especially here in the States, and a lot of times it’s their first job. You throw them on the service floor and when somebody starts yelling at them or presenting issues they’ve never dealt with before, we expect them to automatically react exactly how we think they should. It’s very unrealistic.

Our natural state is not necessarily designed for customer service. Some people are sort of natural “people people” and those people can sort of get by with those skills in a lot of situations, but even they still need techniques and training.

We’re coming back to the motivation again. Will a customer representative be more motivated to perform better if they identify with the company?

Identify with the business, and with their own sense of accomplishment and pride. Any job you have, even if it may not even be your favourite job, you have a choice, every day you walk in the door. You can either decide to do as great job as you can, or you can decide to just go through the motions and just not get fired.

Let’s get back to your book. Does it show how to use the discussed techniques?

Yes, I’m trying to share a couple of them here on the call but also at the end of the book there is a free download of a mini-workbook which will help you get started with some of the techniques. That’s available in the last chapter.

Also, short chapters in the book make it very easy to go back and say: “that’s what I want to work on, that technique really helped me”. I urge people to look at the whole set of customer service techniques and find the ones that are going to move the needle for them at their job. And that’s the best way to start because you can’t master all of them at once, and you really can’t master all of them.

So I always say: pick your three top issues and work on those. Look at which technique works for them, script them out, and try to prepare to use them. And you will be much more comfortable and much more ready for every customer service situation.

What was your worst customer service experience?

That is a tough one! Like everybody, I’ve had a few. One time, I was actually in college, I was at this diner downtown. A lot of students would eat there during lunch. I had this waitress, she was so rude, it was many, many years from this day, but I still remember how bad it was.

She took my order, she barely said a word. I realised there was no silverware on the table so I asked her for it. She snapped at me something like “I’ll get it when I want to.” Literally, it was awful! She comes back with the silverware, and throws it on the table without even looking at me.

The food took forever, I’ve asked about it once but she didn’t acknowledged me. When the food finally came, she slammed it down. I’m not kidding, she literally dropped it from a few inches above the table. I was mystified! I had never been treated like that by a frontline associate before.

It is very obvious looking back now that she was just bringing her personal life and frustrations with whatever was going on that day, and she was letting those affect relationship with the customer.

In the book, there is chapter “It’s Showtime”. What that means is when you get to work, it’s sort of letting everything else go; it’s showtime, you are performing. This is literally a performance, it doesn’t matter what kind of day I’ve had, it doesn’t matter if my dog is sick, because we all have that. We are all going to have some sort of personal issue going on at some point in our careers, but there’s no reason to take it out on the customer.

It’s about being professional, and I think that’s what this person lacked. Many years later it still stands out because it was so rude! I hope she was having a better day afterwards.

OK, and what if she was your employee? Which technique from your book would you choose to fix the situation?

I’d first try to identify was it coming from something that was going on at home or was she just having a bad day, and maybe somebody else has treated her rudely earlier and now she was taking it out on me.

Let’s say that somebody has treated her rudely, she was in a rush and everything just wasn’t working for her. I would ask her: “Hey, let me ask you a question: did that customer affect your day?” She would go “yes”. And I’d say: “why is he still affecting your day? Why are you letting him ruin the next hour?”

You’re always gonna have somebody rude, and you’re gonna have a negative experience when you work with customers because it’s always going to happen. One of the keys is not to let them rent a space in your head, not to let them stay in there for an hour or a day or even a week. People let this stuff really bother them. The first thing to do is to identify the problem, step back and say “why am I letting this person ruin my day? Why am I giving him that power over me?”

It is all about the mindset.

So the conclusion is that customer service is about overcoming our weaknesses, isn’t it?

In many ways it really is. The techniques are important, but you’ve got to have the right mindset before you can get there.

Cover photo courtesy of Loren Javier via Creative Commons.]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/become-a-hero-your-customers-deserve-interview-with-adam-toporek/feed/0How to live happily ever after with your customershttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-live-happily-ever-after-with-your-customers/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-live-happily-ever-after-with-your-customers/#commentsTue, 09 Jun 2015 00:00:13 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=77276So it happened. A customer fell in love with your product, you made a deal, signed a contract, and now you both hope for many years together.

But along the way, it’s easy for a customer to be wowed by competition and try somebody else’s service. For you, it means that once somebody buys a product, that’s when your hard work begins. Because falling in love is the easiest part of any relationship. Maintaining it, that’s a different story. So, what do you do to keep your customers engaged over the years?

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So it happened. A customer fell in love with your product, you made a deal, signed a contract, and now you both hope for many years together.

But along the way, it’s easy for a customer to be amazed by the competition and try their service. For you, it means that once somebody buys a product, that’s when your hard work begins. Falling in love is the easiest part of any relationship. Maintaining it, that’s a different story. So, what do you do to keep your customers engaged over the years?

Truly know your customers and tailor communication

“If customers are the lifeblood of a business, then the database is its heart. Only those companies who truly know their customers and tailor communications to accurately defined target markets will survive and grow,” wrote Ludi Koekemoer and Steve Bird in their book Marketing Communications.

Many companies have a large base of customer data. Yet, few use it in a smart and effective way. Tailored communication is one of those smart methods. Since customers have different interests, you can group them by their preferences and tweak communication that best suit their needs. If you deliver something atractive to your customers, you’ll keep them engaged.

Pizza Hut, to get to know their customers better, carried them through the registration process to define customers’ personal communication, pizza preferences, and delivery instructions. Then the company segmented its customer base into 6,000 behavioral groups and used this information to deliver personalized promotions, predict future purchases and contact customers at the most opportune times through their favourite communication channels.

“Customers have their own preferred channels of communication and their response affinity also varies highly across channels,” explained Juliana Lim, Pizza Hut’s Senior Marketing Director at the time. “The understanding of customers has allowed Pizza Hut to not only segment customers on the basis of their behaviors, but it’s also able to match the right media – email, mobile, direct mail, web – to the right customers resulting in better response to their usual offers,” she added. Pizza Hut noted a 38 percent improvement in customer retention rate.

The company also engages customers beyond selling pizza. Recently, they launched a global blog to tell brand stories. They connect with fans by giving them behind the scenes view of the company.

Moreover, they engage the audience by launching interesting video campaigns, like a video about a cultural phenomenon: selfies – and all the obsession that goes with it. Its goal was to entertain the viewers and provoke a conversation. After all, who hasn’t taken a good selfie recently?

Tim Staples, the co-founder of Shareability, who created the Dangers of Selfie Sticks PSA spot, said:

Smart brands understand that you need to give the audience a valuable piece of content, and then attach their brand in a clever and subtle way. Pizza Hut is a smart brand. The goal of this video is to start a conversation, not beat people over the head with a product message.

Nurture customers through a caring relationship

Social media channels give us an opportunity to have conversation with customers and engage with them directly. Companies just need to start using it right. A typical company limits its actions to updating customers on new products and responding to questions about sales on Twitter and Facebook. It’s always good to keep customers updated, but it’s not enough to keep them engaged.

To nurture customer relationships, you should go outside of your comfort zone and start participating in customers’ conversations about your product. Here’s how Gary Vaynerchuk, the owner of winelibrary.com (the Internet’s leading discount wine retailer), explains how to engage in conversations on customers’ social media channels:

At winelibrary.com I’m able to see that you’re a Pinot Noir drinker. By communicating with you on Twitter or Facebook, I’m able to learn that, in addition to wine, you’re also a football fanatic, regular cupcake eater, and a new gardener. The next time you tweet or post about making cupcakes, I can suggest pairing your cupcakes with a new dessert Riesling in stock that’s similar in taste to another Riesling you mentioned last month.

Make them feel important by personal approach

It’s good to be a long–term client and have benefits from it. Customers need to feel important on a daily basis, each time you make contact. Once they get an impression that you were interested in them only until the sale was made, they won’t be as loyal. So go above and beyond to keep delighting them.

Thank you notes are a great idea, but only when you mean it. People can sense when we do something because it’s the right thing to do, not because we want to. Thank you notes can’t be forced, especially in the form of Christmas wishes once a year. Think about them in an unconventional way.

You can pick up a bizarre holiday, such as International T-shirt Day, and send out a thank you card along with a company’s t-shirt. There’s a big chance that customers are not even aware of that kind of holiday. Since they don’t expect that kind of recognition, they are more likely to appreciate the gesture and engage with you.

Just keep in mind the advice of Erica Ariel Fox, best–selling author of Winning from Within:

Update your database with personal life changes you know about. You don’t want to send good wishes to your client and his wife if they got divorced last year.

After all, a personal approach should bring you closer to a customer, not set you apart.

Maintain great customer relationships

Instead of focusing on the next sale, you can invest some time to get to know your customers’ preferences and nurture relationships with them. It pays off much more than gaining a new customer.

Keep getting to know your customers, engage in conversations they have, and show them that they’re important anytime such chance appears.

You want them to be your lifetime customers, so you need to be constantly working on your relationship. Remember, happily ever after comes one day at a time.

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-live-happily-ever-after-with-your-customers/feed/0Trollbusters: How to deal with unwanted chatshttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-deal-with-unwanted-chats/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-deal-with-unwanted-chats/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 13:54:35 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=77172
Internet is great for people who like to be a pain in the butt. Trolls send malicious messages and leave silly comments, hoping to drive people crazy and enjoy their frustrations.

Trolls want your agents to feel upset with the things they write, and expect strong, emotional reactions. As a result they bring distraction to your team’s work, decrease motivation and impact effectiveness.

LiveChat has not been spared by the trolls. Far from it! We get dozens of troll conversations every day, so our Support Heroes had to master the skill of getting rid of unwanted chatters. And not just that, they have even learned how to benefit from troll-chats! But before we get to that, let’s see what’s their one-two punch method allowing them to slay the trolls.

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Internet is great for people who like to be a pain in the butt. Trolls send malicious messages and leave silly comments, hoping to drive people crazy and enjoy their frustrations.

Trolls want to upset your agents with the things they write and expect strong, emotional reactions. As a result, they bring distraction to your team’s work, decrease motivation and impact effectiveness.

LiveChat has not been spared by the trolls. Far from it! We get dozens of malicious conversations every day so our Support Heroes had to master the skill of getting rid of unwanted chatters. And not just that, they have even learned how to benefit from such chats! But before we get to that, let’s talk about their ‘one-two punch’ method of slaying trolls.

First punch: A bucket of cold water

Before you start getting rid of a troll, you need to make sure that it is actually a troll. Sometimes a person that seems to be trolling may be someone who doesn’t speak in your language well or has confused your website with some other service. For that reason every chatter who asks a weird question gets a message from our agent explaining who did they contact.

So, let’s imagine a situation where an agent is contacted by a chatter stating “I am looking for success” (real example). It can be an honest customer, it can be a person confusing live chat with a business support. It can also be a troll starting his weird conversation. The safest reaction is to send information explaining how we can help them.

Here’s the example of such message:

You are talking to LiveChat software support team, we are here to answer the questions about our software.

Quite dry, isn’t it? It’s the best thing that can be sent to a troll awaiting an emotional, human reaction. At the same time it’s an informative message for confused visitors.

The reply that follows shows the intentions of the chatter. If it’s a customer, they will ask a LiveChat-related questions. If it’s a confused visitor, they will leave the chat. If it’s a troll, they will show their true face (sounds creepy, I know).

When you identify a troll, you can make sure that they don’t get any kicks out of the chat. A couple of impersonal messages do the job and discourage troll from writing. Here is how it looks like in practice:

As you see, Bret has eventually left the chat. He was hoping for a hot reaction. Instead, he got a bucket of cold water.

Of course our agents wouldn’t be able to respond to all such chats manually as this would take too much time. They use a bunch of pre-saved notes which can be entered and sent in a moment (keyboard shortcuts are a great invention the mankind has came up with). Thanks to them we are also sure that a chatter is clearly instructed about the live chat he entered, so there is no room for confusion.

Second punch: Knock the troll out

Formal responses from customer service reps are demotivating for most trolls. However, sometimes we come across more stubborn specimens. They are so desperate to interact with our agents that it’s very difficult to get rid of them. In such situations there is nothing left to do apart from taking the second, final second step: banning.

Our agents ban live chat trolls without regret. If trolls keep nagging our agents, there is no mercy for them. An average ban lasts about three days, but a troll can be sentenced to hundreds of days of banishment if they are very annoying.

Such action is quick and simple and looks like this:

As always, there are exceptions to prove the rule. In LiveChat’s history, there was one epic trolling effort, which was completely unfazed by our attempts to get rid of him. He called himself Garande and our head of customer service, Piotr, was his favourite. Garande started to look for his attention in 2010 and kept coming back asking about Piotr until late 2012.

Thanks to all these years of dedication to Piotr, Garande went down in LiveChat’s history as the most loyal troll. At some point, we even started to treat him like a mascotte. He was discouraged with canned responses and multiple bans, but he never gave up!

But although Garande is an amusing accent in our archive, we’re glad that we did not have more such devoted trolls. Luckily, bans usually work.

Beat them with their own weapon

In most cases trolls are a pain in the butt, but there is a way to benefit from their presence. Trolling back might be a time consuming way of handling troll chats but it can be used as a way to relieve stress in customer service.

This is how Justyna Janowska, our Support Hero, explains this mechanism:

Sometimes, when we’re crazy busy with support chats, we just ban them and carry on. But there are times when we fall for it and take part in this strange game. Mostly to break the routine and have fun. Believe me some of those chats can really make your day (just as others can seriously destroy it). After all, we’re humans and we seek enjoyment in everyday life situations to stay motivated.

For this reason if customer service team has enough time to chat back, they should not be discouraged from doing so. If their work tension can be reduced in such an easy way, why not benefit from it!

Here are some examples of such entertaining chats. In many cases they are weird, amusing and politically incorrect:

Celebrity appearance

Prince Charming

Lord of Hell

Neurotic troll

These stories can teach us a couple of things: that chatting with strangers can be amusing; that sense of humor and being chilled can sometimes be more important than other soft skills. It also teaches us that the art of tactful conversation seems to have its midlife crisis.

Kiss the trolls goodbye

Trolls influence several aspects of customer service job. They take over customer chat slots and make your potential customers wait for a chat in a queue. They rate chats as bad and leave unfavorable comments. They affect statistics. They suck.

Despite the fact that trolls can be sometimes amusing, they always waste your time. Your agents can chats with more interesting troll specimens, but in the end, they will get tired with these too. That’s when a quick slaying technique comes in handy. You can try to figure out what is the most efficient method for you, but you can also use our experience: discourage them with formal responses and, if it doesn’t work, ban them!

For as long as the internet remains anonymous, trolls will continue to waste your time and energy. Your customer service will be receiving a lot of of troll chats, that’s certain. But you need to remember that you are the one in charge here and you can win against them.

So, do not fear to say “farewell” to the trolls. After all, they are nothing but bullies.

Photo courtesty of Tegas Permana via Creative Commons.]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/06/how-to-deal-with-unwanted-chats/feed/0Do you take your customers’ perspectivehttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/05/do-you-take-your-customers-perspective/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/05/do-you-take-your-customers-perspective/#commentsFri, 22 May 2015 08:39:35 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=76858
Perspective-taking is our capacity to see the world from the view of the other person. It is our key skill, which helps us create successful relationships with our customers. By understanding someone else's viewpoint, we find out what they need and want from us, how are they doing with our products and services and, as a result, what we can do to make them happy as well.
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Perspective-taking is our capacity to see the world from the view of the other person. It is our key skill, which helps us create successful relationships with our customers. By understanding someone else’s viewpoint, we find out what they need and want from us, how are they doing with our products and services and, as a result, what we can do to make them happy as well.

The other day, I saw a tweet from Jason Fried, the founder and CEO of Basecamp, saying:

Working customer support today. Few things smack you in the face as hard as seeing customers struggle with something you thought was easy.

That was a perspective-taking experience Jason had. From his point of view, a part of a product he made was easy-to-use. However, from customer’s perspective it was everything but easy.

When seeing a customer struggle with a product or service, people tend to say “What a difficult client. He’s not getting the simplest things” or “Something is wrong with this client.” Such a reaction happens to all of us and it keeps us away from understanding the customer’s view and, as a result, it gets in the way of delivering products and services our customers love.

When we overlook the views of other people, we’re like little children

Our capacity to see the world from another person’s perspective develops early in life. When we look at how little children gain the perspective-taking skill, we can see the two tendencies observable in adults: being closed and being open to the other’s perspective.

In one experiment, psychologists Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik from Berkeley University studied fourteen-month-old and eighteen-month-old toddlers. The toddlers were sitting in front of two bowls: one with goldfish crackers and one with broccoli. The toddlers tasted the food from both bowls. They all liked goldfish more than broccoli. Later, the toddlers watched a researcher express disgust while tasting the crackers and delight while tasting the broccoli. Then, the researcher held out her hand and asked for some food. The toddlers could offer either the crackers or the broccoli to the researcher. What did they do?

Most of the fourteen-month-olds, 87 percent, shared what they liked themselves – the goldfish crackers. The toddlers didn’t understand that the other person had her own want, which is different from their own. However, most of the eighteen-month-olds, 69 percent, handed broccoli to the researcher. These kids understood that they like goldfish crackers themselves but the researcher likes something else.

The behavior of the fourteen-month-olds reminds of the adults behavior when you focus too much on your own viewpoint and ignore how others react to your ideas, products and services. You remain blind to other perspectives, which leads to giving goldfish crackers to those who are longing for broccoli. You simply don’t see and don’t know what other people want from you.

In contrast, the behavior of the eighteen-month-olds reminds of the adult behavior when you open up to the perspectives of other people; you observe how they react to your work or whatever you do for them. You keep your perspective as your own and see the other view as the other view.

Customer support is the place to get customer’s perspective

When I’m closed to someone else’s viewpoint, I like to say that “I’m in a bubble.” A bubble separates me from the outside world and when I want to gain someone else’s perspective I know I need to get out of that bubble. In practice, it comes down to creating possibilities to receive feedback from the people I create stuff for. I do it by watching how they react to my work and by talking to them one-on-one.

Any organization can do it in a similar way: watching customers during user tests, asking for feedback in customer surveys and talking directly to clients. Direct conversations are a great source of information about your clients’ viewpoints. Companies like Basecamp and Kayak use a customer support work for that purpose.

At Basecamp, everyone works customer support on a rotating basis. They call it Everyone On Support (EOS) and it helps the whole team broaden their view on how the product is seen by clients.

Nathan, the operations team member at Basecamp, in one of the Basecamp’s blog posts, shared his insights on how the EOS works for him and his team:

“Ops (Operation teams) can rapidly get detached from the customer, because all we’re doing is keeping the lights on and helping set up new apps. EOS keeps me reminded of why we’re doing that, and how our customers use our products.”

Designers and programmers who get the customer’s insight during EOS are quicker to react to technical issues because perspective-taking accelerates helping out. Here’s what Emily from Basecamp said about that in the same blog post:

“It’s not uncommon for a designer to improve the way something is worded on our website during their EOS shift, or for a programmer to spend some time squashing a bug based on an interaction with a customer.”

At Kayak, the co-founder Paul English handles customer support with Kayak’s engineers. By staying in touch with end-users, technical employees get their perspective firsthand and are highly motivated to fix all the problems that occur in the application.

“If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.”

No matter which part of the business you are in, by doing customer support, you can bring more perspective-taking to your work. When you make it a habit to talk to clients directly, you can be surprised by the insights you get from them.

Don’t stay ignorant to other views

Perspective-taking is a skill that we all have; sometimes we just forget to use it. It’s easy to stay in our frames of reference; closed to other views because our view is the one we see for most of the time. But, if we just place our perspective in the background and do some perspective shifting with our clients, we can discover that some of them like broccoli more than we like goldfish crackers. And then, we can choose to hand them what they like.

]]>http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/05/do-you-take-your-customers-perspective/feed/0How to get more feedback from customershttp://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/05/how-to-get-more-feedback-from-customers/
http://www.livechatinc.com/blog/2015/05/how-to-get-more-feedback-from-customers/#commentsMon, 18 May 2015 12:36:42 +0000http://www.livechatinc.com/?p=76870
To make your customer service better, you first need to know what needs improving. Customer feedback is your go-to source of knowledge in this case. It’s the gas that will keep your customer service machine rolling in the right direction.

However, what if you don’t get enough gas? When your customers don’t tell you what’s wrong or right about your service, you can’t really make informed decisions. Once that happens, you are forced to guess and gamble while your customers’ satisfaction is on the line.

See how The Chat Shop, one of LiveChat's Experts, tackled the problem of getting very few chats rated and tripled the feedback they were getting by introducing one additional message to their communication with customers.

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To make your customer service better, you first need to know what needs improving. Customer feedback is your go-to source of knowledge in this case. It’s the gas that will keep your customer service machine rolling in the right direction.

However, what if you don’t get enough gas? If your customers don’t tell you what’s wrong or right about your service, you can’t really make informed decisions. Once that happens, you are forced to guess and gamble while your customers’ satisfaction is on the line.

See how The Chat Shop, one of LiveChat’s Experts, tackled the problem of getting very few chats rated and tripled the feedback they were getting by introducing one additional message to their communication with customers.

Why customers don’t provide feedback

One of the biggest reasons why customers don’t leave any additional information after a chat is because they simply don’t know they can. In LiveChat, you can leave your opinion in two ways: either by giving the agent a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ during the chat or by providing some additional comments in a survey after a chat.

For The Chat Shop, the chat ratings are an important indication of the quality of service their agents provide. “Our agents love the LiveChat scoreboard as a way of checking who’s delivering the service we promise,” said Jonny Everett, Director of Customer Development at The Chat Shop.

Top rated agents scoreboard.

The Chat Shop used both methods to gather customer feedback. However, they noticed that their post-chat survey was generating more data than the in-chat ratings:

We had post-chat surveys in place which we noticed had much higher completion rates than the in-chat ratings and wondered if customers simply didn’t register to ‘place their vote’ before the conversation ended.

On top of that, the customers served by The Chat Shop seemed to use the rating buttons mostly when the wanted to leave negative feedback, which skewed the already scarce results:

Customers would also often seek out the thumbs down if they were particularly annoyed, but positive customers wouldn’t always take the time to cast their vote.

Although many users were satisfied with the received service, The Chat Shop team was getting feedback from the small minority of the unsatisfied users. If they were to act based on those few negative opinions, they could risk ruining the experience for the silent majority of the satisfied users.

Getting a detailed look on feedback

The Chat Shop needed to find a way to get a clearer look at the big picture – a method that would show more accurate distribution of the good and bad ratings. One way to do that is to inform the users about the rating option and encourage them to use it:

Amy, our Team Manager, wanted to find a way to increase the in-chat ratings usage so it could give her and the team more insight into the service we were delivering so she decided to flag the rating option to customers so that there were a larger volume of responses allowing the agents and our management team to have another tool to monitor satisfaction.

The Chat Shop agents started sending a small message at the end of each chat that encourages visitors to rate their experience. Two such messages were tested. Jonny stated that both were suggested by The Chat Shop’s agents – Rhys and Jess B – who are “at the sharp end of the service,” which makes their feedback on the matter vital.

Here’s what the messages look like:

“Been a pleasure chatting with you today. If you need anything else, feel free to start a new chat. Please consider clicking the ‘thumbs up’ at the top of the chat if you were happy with the support provided.”

“Thank you for chatting with us today. If you were happy with the support provided, please consider clicking the ‘thumbs up’ at the top of the chat! If there’s anything else we can help with, please feel free to start a new chat.”

Results: three times more ratings

The introduction of these closing messages led to great results. Visitors are now more aware of the rating function and The Chat Shop gets a lot of additional data.

Before the change, they got only 5.5 percent of their chats rated. After introducing the closing messages, they saw a jump to 17 percent of chats rated. This means that their customers left three times more ratings. “That’s a lot of additional valuable data, especially when you consider how well the LiveChat system integrates the in-chat rating vs. say a post-chat survey response which is more cumbersome to analyse by agent and transcript,” said Jonny. “Shout out to Amy, Jess B and Rhys from our team for this awesome idea,” Jonny added.

Change made mid February yielded great results.

Having this much additional data to play with makes both the agents and managers more aware of the service quality and allows them to make more informed decisions on how to improve it.

Any company using live chat can utilize this method to get more chats rated. Simply start asking visitors to rate their experience at the end of each chat. You can test several messages to see which yield the best results. By adding a canned response with a rating request, your agents will be able to send it with just a couple of keystrokes.

Companies often spend thousands of dollars on complex market research to learn what their customers think. With this simple change, you will get that extra feedback at the cost of one additional message sent at the end of a your chats.

Jonny Everett, Director of Customer Development at The Chat ShopFor the last 3 years, Jonny has developed clients’ businesses by helping companies better communicate with their customers, allowing Real People to have Real Conversations. With a firm belief that brands must put service first, Jonny has worked with a range of clients improving their customer service and lead generation. You can get in touch with Jonny via Twitter or email: hello@thechatshop.com.